NEW HAVEN >> For more than two years, Escape New Haven has made its money by locking eager adventurers in a room.

Once locked in, those seeking adventure are given an hour to follow clues and solve a series of sequential puzzles to find the master key to escape.

Amid these locked doors, Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent, co-founder of Escape New Haven, said he and his team have never had more creative freedom.

With business partner Max Sutter, Rodriguez-Torrent is now developing a game with a new plot and puzzles, with an expected launch later this month. He’s reluctant to divulge too many details, but he describes it as keeping with Escape New Haven’s desire to remain interesting and innovative.

“It’s much more plot-driven, much more high-tech, there are no physical locks, which is kind of unusual. It’s intuitive, logical puzzle solving,” he said. “There are a couple of new game dynamics.”

Further, while Escape New Haven relied heavily on found items for puzzles in its infancy, Rodriguez-Torrent said the business has more financial and operational resources to make good games, including relying on the unique strengths of its staff. Sutter, he said, is an engineer, and Rodriguez-Torrent has business experience, but some employees bring with them theater experience to enhance production values, for instance.

Rodriguez-Torrent’s first escape room experience was in New York in 2014, when it already was a big hit in Asia and Europe but hadn’t yet caught fire in the United States.

The experience was good, but he was convinced he could improve upon it. For instance, instead of having a staffer in the room offering hints, the process could be done electronically using surveillance and an employee in a control room (This is now the industry standard, he said).

Much of the escape room industry business, including in New Haven, is based not on advertising, he said, but on high quality games that travel through word of mouth.

And there has been a lot of word of mouth, apparently, with more than 40,000 escape attempts to date, according to Escape’s website.

How does it work? As Escape New Haven describes it, “You’re locked in a room, along with 1-7 other people — old friends or new, it’s up to you. A countdown timer shows that you have 60 minutes remaining. You look around the room. A locked cabinet; strange markings on the wall; an unfinished diary... What does it all mean? You can only hope that by working together, solving puzzle after puzzle, your team will find a way out before time runs out. The clock is ticking.”

In her final weeks of college in 2014, she was looking for a thing groups of people can do for a friend’s bachelorette party, she said. The group of 10, who did the activity in Mystic, were all enthralled.

“The whole group has gone off and done different adventure room things,” she said.

Since her first experience, she said, she’s found escape rooms to be good venues for her family and for dates.

“You can do it, you have fun even if you’ve had no experience with puzzles. They’re not made to be hard or challenging. It’s more about being creative and working together,” she said. “I think everyone should do it. It will surprise them. Sometimes people might be surprised at what they know and could work out on their own.”

In addition to the Escape New Haven location on Whitney Avenue, Rodriguez-Torrent and his team are also looking to expand its reach by developing programs for use outside of its permanent location. One example of this could be a citywide Easter egg hunt, which they have run for three years. As a potential reward, hunters could earn a free game at Escape the Room.

“Kids love to gamify t things. Everyone loves to gamify things where the system is reward-based,” Harrigan said.

Harrigan’s first exposure to Escape New Haven was bringing a local team of students involved in the FIRST LEGO league, a robotics competition geared toward preteens, for team building.

“It was meant to enhance them getting along with one another and enhance their critical thinking skills,” he said. “Kids love the mystery and the tactile, hands-on, go-and-discover-something learning nature.”

For the children, Harrigan said the lesson was that, although their imaginations ran wild by expecting something unexpected, sometimes the answer to a problem might be fairly obvious. Additionally, the children sometimes got excitable working on the same problem when there were multiple tasks to solve, so he and another adult liaison encouraged them to split up and communicate.

“It’s a great ice breaker for kids who were otherwise only somewhat acquainted with one another,” he said.

Because a classroom will not fit in any commercial escape room, which ordinarily fits a maximum of eight to 10 people, some teachers have begun using the concept in school.

A Milford sixth-grade enrichment teacher developed an escape room for middle school students, and a former director of innovation for the Westport Library created one for a breakout class of an annual Minds in Motion event for gifted children. Harrigan himself developed a multimedia escape room for his son’s fifth-grade class.

“It’s an activity for all learners that gets away from being taught to the test and remind that learning isn’t just hammering in facts to do well on standardized tests,” he said.

Rodriguez-Torrent said Escape New Haven is mindful of including a diversity of puzzles to keep games fresh and to appeal to several different types of thinkers.

Although Rodriguez-Torrent and Sutter have launched only one location in Connecticut, they’re also behind Escape Sacramento and Escape Rhode Island. There are other escape room locations in the state, including Torrington, Middletown, Farmington, Norwalk, Danbury and Stamford.